Hashim was fond of pointing out that while he was not a godly man he set store by "living honourably in the world." In that spacious lakeside, residence, all outsiders were greeted with the same formality and respect, even those unfortunates who came to negotiate for small fragments of Hashim's large fortune, and of whom he naturally asked an interest rate of over seventy percent, partly, as he told his khrichi-spooning wife, "to teach these people the value of money."

Nadine Gordimer, "The Moment the Gun Went Off," twentieth century

The rifle was one of his father's, because his own was at the gunsmith's in town. Since his father died (Beetge's sergeant wrote "passed on") no one had used the rifle and so when he took it fom a cupboard he was sure it was not loaded. His father had never allowed a loaded gun in the house; he himself had been taught since childhood never to ride with a loaded weapon in the vehicle. But the gun was loaded.

Yeats, "Easter 1916," twentieth century

I write it out in a verse:

MacDonough and MacBride

And Connoly and Pearse,

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn--

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

James Joyce, "The Dead," twentieth century

He stood in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

Thomas Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain," twentieth century

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The immanent will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate

For her--so gaily--great

A Shape of Ice, for the time for and dissociate.

Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," twentieth century

If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word, materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

Virginia Woolf, "The Mark on the Wall," twentieth century

I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, walking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshiping the chest of drawers, worshiping solidity, worshiping reality, worshiping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree, and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow.

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," twentieth century

I have heard mermaids, singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

James Joyce, "The Dead," twentieth century

...[the snow] was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Yeats, "Among School Children," twentieth century

Labour is blossoming or dance where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom, of the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Thomas Hardy, "Neutral Tones," twentieth century

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

And wings with wrong have shaped to me

Your face, and the God-crust sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Auden, "Musee Des Beaux Arts," twentieth century

In Breughel's carus for instance, how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from disaster; the ploghman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to do on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed on calmly.

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," twentieth century

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells.

Matthew Arnold, "To Marguerite--Continued," victorian age

Oh! Then longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely, once they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent!

Now round us spreads the watery plain--

Oh might our marges meet again!

Who ordered that their longing's fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?

Who renders vain their deep despair?--

A God, a God their severance ruled!

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumbed, salt. estranging sea.

Tennyson, "In Memoriam," victorian age

I hold it true, whate'ver befall:

I feel it, when I sorry most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach," victorian age

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as soon as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Robert Browning, "Porphyria's Lover," victorian age

That moment she was mine, mine fair,

Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three time her little throat around,

And strangled her.

Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott," victorian age

She left the web, she left the loom

She made three paces through the room

She saw the water lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She looked down at Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror cracked from side to side;

"The curse is come upon me!"

Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," victorian age

...Even had you skill / in speech--(Which I have not)-- to make your will / Quite clear such an once, and say, "Just this / Or that in you disgusts me; have you miss / Or there exceed the mark"-- and if she let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse / --E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose / Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt / Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without / Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands: / Then all the smiles stopped together.

Robert Browning, "My last Duchess," victorian age

She thanked men-- good! But thanked

Somehow--I know now how--as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame

That sort of trifling?

Tennyson, "In Memoriam," victorian age

He is not here; but far away

The noise of life begins again,

And ghastly through the drizzling rain

On the bald streets breaks the blank day.

Elizabeth Barret Browning, "Sonnets from the Portuguese," victorian age